Movies - Mortal Kombat: Annihilation

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	Movies - Mortal Kombat: Annihilation

Mortal Kombat: Annihilation is a 1997 movie that was directed by John R. Leonetti. It is the sequel to Mortal Kombat
. It was based on the popular Mortal Kombat fighting game series.

Taglines:

Destroy All Expectations!
Nothing Will Ever Be The Same
The world was created in six days, so too shall it be destroyed and on the seventh day mankind will rest... in peace
Last time they were fighting for their lives. This time they're fighting for ours.
This time there is no tournament. This time there are no rules. This time there is only Annihilation.

Plot Summary

The evil emperor Shao Kahn illegally opens a portal from the Out World to the Earthrealm and has reclaimed his Queen, Sindel. Liu Kang, Raiden, and their fellow Earth Realm warriors have only six days to defeat Shao Khan and his fellow fighters in order to close the portal. If they fail, then all of mankind will be destroyed on the seventh day.

Critical reaction and performance

The movie was even less well-received than its predecessor and is considered in most ways inferior. While continuing in the visual spirit of the first movie, it had nowhere near the level of authenticity in both its special effects and fight choreography. Additionally, Annihilation suffers from an overtly large and homogeneous cast, employed to depict as many Mortal Kombat characters as possible (most of whom appeared for a minute or two, then disappeared never to be seen again with hardly any good reason whatsoever), with a subsequent drop in characterization. Adding to that, due to budget cuts, there was a lot of re-used footage in some scenes. For instance, Baraka's fall into a fiery pit was the same shot used for Rain's death, since the purple color of the latter's uniform is somewhat visible in the darkness. Fans of the series also complained of a large number of inconsistencies with the storyline of the games, such as the fact that Raiden and Shao Kahn were brothers and the Fallen Elder God Shinnok was their father (in the games, none of them are related).

Many props were custom-made for some of the characters in the film. One such prop was Kitana's metal fans, which were first seen as handle-less and wavy blades during Kitana's battle with one of Shao Kahn's extermination squads.

The cast was almost entirely revamped with only Robin Shou (Liu Kang) & Talisa Soto (Kitana) returning, both of them considered to be the film's only good assets. Also Keith Cooke, the actor who portrayed Reptile in the first movie was cast as the new Sub-Zero, who is the younger brother of the original, and Soto's stunt-double from the first movie, Dana Hee, is the actress portraying Mileena, Kitana's identical twin sister. Paul W. S. Anderson, the director of the first movie, refused to take part in this movie when the screenwriters did not make any true changes to the script. Almost all of the original cast refused to take part in it for similar reasons. All told, a combination of low funding, an unrealistically ambitious script, worn-out ideas, wooden acting from the new cast, notoriously laughable dialogue, B-movie special effects and repetitive fight sequences gave this $40-million movie a prominent position at IMDB's bottom 100 list.

Legacy

Apart from being generally regarded as a classic example of bad filmmaking, this movie caused the Mortal Kombat franchise to lose strength during the late 90s. Despite the success of Mortal Kombat 4 (in both arcades and home consoles), interest began declining due to a steady crop of ill-fated projects such as Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero (a side-scrolling prequel in which the original Sub-Zero is the lead character) and two short-lived TV shows Mortal Kombat: Defenders of the Realm and Mortal Kombat: Conquest that lasted only one season each (despite the fact that Conquest was popular). The franchise reached its nadir during the time of the mediocre Mortal Kombat Gold (an update of MK4) and the disastrous Mortal Kombat: Special Forces in 1999, when Midway finally decided to take some time off to get some really fresh ideas.

During that same year, John Tobias, the co-creator of the series and the main storyteller, resigned due to the recent downturn Mortal Kombat was going through, taking a large number of Midway's staff with him. By the start of the new millennium, Mortal Kombat seemed to be a relic of the 1990s until the release of the direct-to-console Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance (2002) re-ignited interest in the series.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Mortal Kombat: Annihilation ]

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